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The Opposite of Fate

A Book of Musings

An unbearably moving, intensely passionate, deeply personal account of life as seen through the eyes of one of America's best-loved novelists.

'When I began writing this history, I let go of my doubts. I trusted the ghosts of my imagination. They showed me the hundred secret senses. And what I wrote is what I discovered about the endurance of love.'

So writes Amy Tan at the beginning of this remarkably candid insight into her life. Tan takes us on a journey from her childhood, as a sensitive but intelligent young Chinese-American, ashamed of her parents' Chinese ways, to the present day and her position as one of the world's best-loved novelists.

She describes the daily difficulties of being at once American and Chinese and yet feeling at times like she was truly neither. Most significantly, and heartbreakingly, she tells the history of her family: the grandmother who committed suicide as the only means of defiance open to her against a husband who ignored her wishes; her remarkable mother, whose first husband had her jailed when she tried to leave him; and the shocking deaths of both her father and husband when Amy was just 14.

How this weight of history has brought itself to bear on the adult Amy looms large in her own story. Ghosts, chance and fate have played a part in her life, and 'The Opposite of Fate' is an insight into those ancestors, the women who 'never let me forget why these stories need to be told'.

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This is the second book of Amy Tan, from three that I read or attempted to read completely and I couldn't.
She is repeating herself in many respects, except "Saving Fish from Drowning", describing
the same "tricks" of her mother and how it affected Amy Tan. The impression is that she tries in all of her books convince herself that she forgave her mother for all the humiliation. And so she s "digging" in the past of her parents, trying to justify, sometimes not amenable to any excuses, despite the difficulties, mental illness, grief and misfortune, the behaviour of her mother.
The book will be of great benefit to those who write a review about the works of Amy Tan.